Maria Korporal – ZoOm into my Room, 4:57, 2020



 

Our social and private life has undergone a drastic turn towards digitalisation as a consequence of the pandemic that originated at the beginning of 2020. Human contacts now often are replaced by video-chat Zoom or Jitsy.
In this video, I try to show the human experience of loneliness and impotence during their „meetings“ in cyberspace. Even if the light image accurately depicts the person, eye contact is impossible. We look at a screen that shows a simulacrum of some other human being and of ourselves.
The video develops seamless in three stages: in the “introduction” images of video, chats transfer proper light beams from chat rooms into real rooms, followed by what could be called the phase of “creation”, in which a lonely person who’s chatting tries to pull the simulacrum out of the light beams, zoom it into her room and bring it to life, and thirdly the phase “longing”, in which the eternal longing for the deep contact with the other is expressed.

In his science fiction novel Neuromancer, published in 1984, William Gibson wrote the revealing phrase: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation …” In the last decades we saw this global development coming about, but the Covid virus has accelerated this significantly. However, the video goes further back in time. Cinema lovers will unfailingly recognize the references to „Maschinen-Maria“ of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), another visionary of the technological future. And the profiles in the last scene, which hesitantly approach each other and break away, again and again, are ancient Greco-Roman sculptures, simulacra from the cradle of our culture.

music: “Blue Funk Hypertransit” (excerpts) by Edoardo Pistolesi Somigli
concept, images, animation, effects and montage: Maria Korporal

 

“Art is my life, the apparently endless walk from birth to death. My ideas and inspirations come from everything I meet on my way. Each project is always a new adventure; a blank sheet to work on. Each of my works can be seen as a journey, but also as a re-birth.”

Maria Korporal was born 1962 in Sliedrecht, the Netherlands. She studied graphics and painting at the St. Joost Academy of Fine Arts in Breda. During her studies, she began working with photography and she graduated with, among other things, a video installation.
Maria Korporal’s artistic production includes video art, interactive projects, installations. Her multimedia work has been designed using a wide variety of techniques. The narrative aspect, both personal and social, plays a major role in her work and, together with the directness of the images and the sounds, leads to great participation of the viewer. Her interactive installations in particular invite the viewer to participate. In her work, she plays with virtuality and reality, with undergone and artificially generated experiences. Most of her projects deal with social and environmental issues.